It’s Time for NATO to Go the Way of the Warsaw Pact

The outcome of the July 11-12 NATO meeting
in Brussels got lost amid the media’s obsession with President Donald Trump’s
bombast, but the “Summit
Declaration” makes for sober reading.
The media
reported that the 28-page document “upgraded military readiness,” and was “harshly
critical of Russia,” but there wasn’t much detail beyond that.

But details matter, because that’s where the
devil hides.

One such detail is NATO’s “Readiness Initiative”
that will beef up naval, air, and ground forces in “the eastern portion of the
Alliance.” NATO is moving to base troops in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, the
Czech Republic, and Poland. Since Georgia and Ukraine have been invited to join
the Alliance, some of those forces could end up deployed on Moscow’s western
and southern borders.

And that should give us pause.

A recent European Leadership’s Network’s (ELN)
study
titled “Envisioning a Russia-NATO Conflict” concludes, “The current Russia-NATO
deterrence relationship is unstable and dangerously so.” The ELN is an independent
think tank of military, diplomatic, and political leaders that fosters “collaborative”
solutions to defense and security issues.

High on the study’s list of dangers is “inadvertent
conflict,” which ELN concludes “may be the most likely scenario for a breakout”
of hostilities. “The close proximity of Russian and NATO forces” is a major
concern, argues the study, “but also the fact that Russia and NATO have been
adapting their military postures towards early reaction, thus making rapid escalation
more likely to happen.”

With armed forces nose-to-nose, “a passage
from crisis to conflict might be sparked by the actions of regional commanders
or military commanders at local levels or come as a consequence of an unexpected
incident or accident.” According to the European Leadership Council, there have
been more than 60 such incidents
in the last year.

Which Side Is Advancing?

The NATO document is, indeed, hard on Russia,
which it blasts for the “illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea,” its
“provocative military activities, including near NATO borders,” and its “significant
investments in the modernization of its strategic [nuclear] forces.”

Unpacking all that requires a little history,
which isn’t the media’s strong suit.

The story goes back more than three decades to the fall of the Berlin Wall
and eventual reunification of Germany. At the time, the Soviet Union had some
380,000 troops in what was then the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany.
Those forces were there as part of the treaty ending World War II, and the Soviets
were concerned that removing them could end up threatening the USSR’s borders.
The Russians have been invaded – at terrible cost – three times in
a little more than a century.

So in the early 1990s, West German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, and Soviet Premier Mikhail
Gorbachev cut a deal. The Soviets agreed to withdraw troops from Eastern Europe
as long as NATO didn’t fill the vacuum, or recruit members of the Soviet-dominated
Warsaw Pact. Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch east.”

The agreement was never written down, but it
was followed in practice. NATO stayed west of the Oder and Neisse rivers separating
Germany and Poland, and Soviet troops returned to Russia. The Warsaw Pact was
dissolved in 1991.

But President Bill Clinton blew that all up in 1999, when the US and NATO intervened
in the civil war between Serbs and Albanians over the Serbian province of Kosovo.
Behind the new American doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” NATO opened
a massive 11-week bombing campaign against Serbia.

From Moscow’s point of view, the war was unnecessary.
The Serbs were willing to withdraw their troops and restore Kosovo’s autonomous
status. But NATO
demanded a large occupation force
that would be immune from Serbian law, something the nationalist-minded Serbs
would never agree to. It was virtually the same provocative language the Austrian-Hungarian
Empire had presented to the Serbs in 1914, language that set off World War I.

In the end, NATO lopped off part of Serbia to create Kosovo and redrew the
post World War II map of Europe, exactly what the Alliance charges today that
Russia has done with its seizure of the Crimea.

But NATO didn’t stop there. In 1999, the Alliance
recruited former Warsaw Pact members Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic,
adding Bulgaria and Romania four years later. By the end of 2004, Moscow was
confronted with NATO in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to the north, Poland
to the west, and Bulgaria and Turkey to the south. Since then, the Alliance
has added Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, and Montenegro. It has invited
Georgia, Ukraine, Macedonia,
and Bosnia and Herzegovina to apply as well.

When the NATO document chastises Russia for
“provocative” military activities near the NATO border, it is referring to maneuvers
within Russia’s own borders, or one of its few allies, Belarus.

As author and foreign policy analyst Anatol
Lieven points out, “Even a child”
can look at a 1988 map of Europe and see “which side has advanced in which direction.”

NATO also accuses Russia of “continuing a military
buildup in Crimea,” without a hint that those actions might be in response to
what the Alliance document calls its “substantial increase in NATO’s presence
and maritime activity in the Black Sea.” Russia’s largest naval port on the
Black Sea is Sevastopol in the Crimea.

Worrisome Disconnects

One does not expect evenhandedness in such a document, but there are disconnects
in this one that are worrisome.

Yes, the Russians are modernizing their nuclear forces, but the Obama administration
was first out of that gate in 2009 with its $1.5 trillion program to upgrade
the US’s nuclear weapons systems. Both programs are a bad idea.

Some of the document’s language about Russia
is aimed at loosening purse strings at home. NATO members agreed to cough up
more money, a decision that preceded Trump’s Brussels tantrum on spending.

There is some wishful thinking on Afghanistan
– “Our Resolute Support Mission is achieving success” – when in fact things
have seldom been worse. There are vague references to the Middle East and North
Africa, nothing specific, but a reminder that NATO is no longer confining its
mission to what it was supposedly set up to do: Keep the Americans in, the Russians
out, and the Germans down.

The Americans are still in – one should take
Trump’s threat of withdrawal with a boulder-sized piece of salt – there is no
serious evidence the Russians ever planned to come in, and the Germans have
been up since they joined NATO in 1955. Indeed, it was the addition of Germany
that sparked the formation of the Warsaw Pact.

While Moscow is depicted as an aggressive adversary, NATO surrounds Russia
on three sides, has deployed antimissile systems in Poland, Romania, Spain,
Turkey, and the Black Sea, and has a 12 to 1 advantage in military spending.
With opposing forces now toe-to-toe, it would not take much to set off a chain
reaction that could end in a nuclear exchange.

Yet instead of inviting a dialogue, the document
boasts that the Alliance has “suspended all practical civilian and military
cooperation between NATO and Russia.”

The solution seems obvious.

First, a return to the 1998 military deployment. While it is unlikely that
former members of the Warsaw Pact would drop their NATO membership, a withdrawal
of non-national troops from NATO members that border Russia would cool things
off. Second, the removal of antimissile systems that should never have been
deployed in the first place.

In turn, Russia could remove the middle-range
Iskander missiles NATO is complaining about and agree to talks aimed at reducing
nuclear stockpiles.

But long range, it’s finally time to rethink alliances. NATO was a child of
the Cold War, when the West believed that the Soviets were a threat. But Russia
today is not the Soviet Union, and there’s no way Moscow would be stupid enough
to attack a superior military force.

The old ways of thinking are not only outdated,
but also dangerous. It’s time NATO went the way of the Warsaw Pact.